Establishing Social Dialog between Buildings and Their Users

ABSTRACT

Behavioral intervention strategies have yet to become successful in the development of initiatives to foster pro-environmental behaviors in buildings. In this paper, we explored the potentials of increasing the effectiveness of requests aiming to promote pro-environmental behaviors by engaging users in a social dialog, given the effects of two possible personas that are more related to the buildings (i.e., building vs. building manager). We tested our hypotheses and evaluated our findings in virtual and physical environments and found similar effects in both environments. Our results showed that social dialog involvement persuaded respondents to perform more pro-environmental actions. However, these effects were significant when the requests were delivered by an agent representing the building. In addition, these strategies were not equally effective across all types of people and their effects varied for people with different characteristics. Our findings provide useful design choices for persuasive technologies aiming to promote pro-environmental behaviors.

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No 1548517. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Saba Khashe

Saba Khashe earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on transforming buildings into interactive living spaces that communicate with their occupants and influence the ways that they interact with the buildings with the goal of promoting pro-environmental behaviors in buildings.

Gale Lucas

Gale Lucas is a Research Assistant Professor at University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). After earning her PhD from Northwestern University, she completed her postdoctoral work at ICT. Her work is centered around understanding how various social factors affect trust in agents and robots.

Burcin Becerik-Gerber

Burcin Becerik-Gerber is an Associate Professor in Civil Engineering; her research falls at the intersection of built environments, machine intelligence, and systems thinking. She focuses on the development of novel methods for the acquisition, modelling, and analysis for cognitive built environments that can perceive, sense, reason and collaborate with users.

Jonathan Gratch

Jonathan Gratch is a Research Full Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at the University of Southern California. Dr. Gratch’s research focuses on computational models of human cognitive and social processes, especially emotion, and explores these models’ role in shaping human–computer interactions.